Religious Discrimination in UK Schools: 51% Parents Say Their Children Experienced ‘Anti-Hindu’ Hate, Shows Study

In a first, a report has studied “anti-Hindu hate” in the UK through the lens of discrimination faced by Hindu students within the school system. One of the key findings of the national study showed that 51 percent of parents of Hindu pupils surveyed said their children had experienced anti-Hindu hate in schools. It also showed that fewer than 1 percent of the schools with Indian pupils, queried by Freedom of Information (FOI), reported any anti-Hindu incident in the last five years.

Apart from highlighting bullying incidents involving “anti-Hindu slurs”, the report also detailed another aspect of such hatred propagated through the teaching of Hinduism in schools. Under the religious education curriculum, as per some of the participants in the survey, schools teaching Hinduism often fostered religious discrimination towards Hindu students.

The report, Anti-Hindu hate in schools, documents how anti-Hindu hate is on the rise in schools in UK. It has been published by a London-based think tank, Henry Jackson Society (HJS), and authored by research fellow Charlotte Littlewood of the Centre on Social and Political Risk. It seeks to understand what anti-Hindu hate looks like and the extent to which it is manifesting in the UK by first looking at discrimination against Hindu students in schools.

“We are very concerned… and the aim of this study is to look at how we can use schools to tackle this hate,” Littlewood told CNN-News18. The author is a PhD candidate in Arab and Islamic studies with the University of Exeter and her research focuses on “minority within Muslim minority conflict in the UK, in particular the persecution of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community and the extent to which the UK is able to support this community”, as per the HJS website.

‘Convert to Islam, your lives will be easier’

The study documented the experiences of Hindu students, as told by their parents, around six major themes related to prejudices related to politics in India, Abrahamic othering and Hindu religious education: Anti-Hindu slurs, far right/xenophobia, Islamist extremism, linking Hindu pupils to India, poor teaching of Hinduism, lack of school provision with respect to Hindu festivals and practices.

In fact, in the sub-section for Islamist extremism, the study detailed how Muslim pupils told their Indian classmates to convert to Islam that would make their lives “so much easier”. It detailed references to Islamic supremacy, calls for Hindus to convert as well as threats of hell for disbelievers.

Instances where Muslim pupils have used terms such as “kaffir” for their Hindu classmates have also been documented. Parents have even given examples: “Harassed and told that if they convert to Islam, their life will become so much easier (i.e. bullying will stop)” or “You aren’t going to survive very long… If you want to go to paradise, you’ll have to come to Islam… Hindus are the herbivores at the bottom of the food chain, we will eat you up.”

Apart from this there are negative references to polytheism and idol worship. For example: “You don’t know about your own religion, you have so many gods. Your religion is idol worship (even though they were corrected to say deity worship, and they continued to insist that it’s the same). When teachers say these things, they undermine the students and make a mockery of them.”

Not only this, the study also documented negative references to “typical xenophobic tropes” such as ‘go back home’ and those related to skin colour. There are also references to Christian supremacy and how Hindu students are often referred to as “Paki” (as being from Pakistan).

Hindu students have often faced bullying due to how their faith is taught in these schools, especially when it is linked to societal ills such as the caste system or ancient practices (which have not been practised for decades) like sati pratha.

Many parents told the author that their children are held responsible for politics in India: “Other students tried to bully my daughter that she is Hindu – saying ‘why you people break our mosque, why you people attack us?’ So we changed the school” or “child has faced bullying from other children on many occasions specifically after PM Modi’s rise in India and after article 370 was revoked.”

The unequal approach to Hindu practices and festivals as compared to other religions was also documented with parents saying there is no holiday for major Hindu festivals like Diwali while Muslims pupils get three for Eid.

Key concern: Hinduism taught through lens of Abrahamic faith

A key concern raised by Hindu parents was how religious education with regard to teaching of Hinduism in UK schools was flawed. They said Hinduism was being taught through the lens of Abrahamic faith, which led to non-Hindu students misunderstanding some key concepts of polytheism and religious practices.

Littlewood’s report shed light on how the curriculum for teaching Hinduism failed to achieve the aims of religious education teaching in general and had a poor approach towards the religion. It also explored how Hindu students were held accountable or responsible for political issues or societal ills, such as the caste system, back in India.

“To appreciate the nature and function of caste, an understanding of historical, theological and sociological elements is needed which is typically beyond the scope of primary and even secondary education,” Dr Rishi Handa, head of Sanskrit and religious studies and philosophy at St James Senior Boys’ School, is quoted as saying in the report. According to his profile on the HJS website, Handa has been a teacher for over 25 years and is presently working to create a training programme to assist teachers of religious studies in “comprehending and instructing Indian religions via a framework that more accurately reflects Indic sensibilities, in contrast to the western and Abrahamic approaches currently used”.

The study states that Hinduism is one of the religions covered under the religious education curriculum. But a report by the Commission on Religious Education (CoRE) suggested that “since subject inspections ended in 2013, quality and provision of religious education has dropped”.

UK schools ill-equipped to identify, prevent anti-Hindu hate

The report is also the first to probe to what extent UK schools are ill-equipped to identify and prevent incidents of anti-Hindu hate. It suggests that not only Hindu students, but students of other religious minorities may also be experiencing bullying and alienation that escapes official notice.

According to the study, only 19 percent of the Hindu parents surveyed believe schools are able to identify anti-Hindu hate while only 15 percent said these incidents were adequately addressed. In fact, the study has documented at least eight cases of physical abuse where parents chose to detail incidents and three cases of students having to move school owing to anti-Hindu bullying.

Conservative Party MP Ben Everitt, who has written the foreword to the study, has said the findings of the report are “damning” and that anti-Hindu discrimination has to be looked at for what it is: multifaceted.

“We see how this type of discrimination can take the form of anti-Hindu slurs, but also in how a problematic approach to teaching Hinduism may be feeding into prejudice, and whether incidents of bullying and discrimination are being adequately dealt with by each individual school,” Everitt says in the foreword.

He adds: “One of the most revealing findings in this report, is the prevalence of certain slurs in the classroom and around school, which can only serve to alienate young Hindu people. Young Hindus are facing a range of prejudice from that which targets their religion to xenophobia; what is clear is that this type of discrimination is going under the radar; with incidents not being properly recorded or reported.”

According to the study, Hinduism is the third largest religion in the UK making up 1.7 percent of the population. But there is little research on the experience of British Hindus as a diaspora. This was brought up as a major concern when Hindu homes, vehicles, businesses and a temple came under attack during civil unrest in Leicester from September 4 to 20, 2022.

This report is the first national study into the discrimination faced by Hindu youth in the UK. It, however, refrains from using the “still-unfamiliar term Hinduphobia” and chooses to address the incidents as “anti-Hindu hate”.

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